rockbier1218
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User ID: 1794
rockbier1218
22d ago
one other interesting twist on all of this is that Trump is extremely old. This is not a charismatic 40-year old who has the potential to cement his rule for a decade+. Trump is inherently a short-term politician, and if he starts being a short-term loser then it’s a lot easier for people to jump ship. There is little chance he stages some kind of comeback in the future after this which would cause people to doubt if defecting now will come back to bite them later.
rockbier1218
22d ago
Certainly possible. My prediction rests on the assumption that we are about to see economic catastrophe worse than 2008. That’s my take at least.
If that doesn’t end up happening and we instead just have something like Covid or an average recession then absolutely he will ride out the term.
But I simply don’t see how if we have financial oblivion Trump survives. There are too many powerful elites that will also be impacted and even the average GOP voter will revolt and turn on Trump if the bread and circuses are gone
rockbier1218
22d ago
Up till now MAGA has been neutral to positive for the average American. Trump didn’t really do anything that’s impacted Joe Six-pack and if anything has delivered some wins on woke and DEI. And his tax cuts broadly benefited Joe Six-pack in the short-term as well.
So the only real reasons to oppose Trump have been “he’s vulgar” or political games like Jan 6 that democrats also played. Or you’re a woke lib who hates him on principle.
But now all of a sudden people are staring at GFC part 2 with the potential for much much worse. Joe Six-pack will get annihilated with inflation and might get laid off too. And whose fault is it? It’s 100% on Trump and everybody knows it.
All of a sudden even conservatives are like “wait a minute wtf” and that will lead to political pressure on Trump from essentially all of America except the most diehard of his base (and how many of them are diehard enough when they are about to lose their homes and a t-shirt is $50?)
There’s all kinds of fun options depending on how bad it gets.
There’s already 7 GOP senators trying to take his tariff power away and nothing tangible outside the market has even happened yet. Elon is calling other members of the inner circle retards for their trade policy (proxy shot at Trump).
Most realistic scenario is that congress just votes to take tariffs away and overrides the veto. If there is blood in the streets even a GOP congressman will be loyal to his constituents who are mailing him death threats and threatening his political career forever. And it’s much easier to swallow just taking back tariff power over an actual impeachment or something.
If it gets really bad, like Great Depression bad, I would bet my life savings he gets JFKed or has a mysterious heart attack/plane crash/take your pick.
You simply cannot survive as a politician in America if you fuck with the economy to this extent. We already see the campaign ramping up, Jamie Dimon and other financial bigwigs are pressuring Trump (first option in the toolbox) but if he continues to go full retard they will take the other tools out too.
rockbier1218
22d ago
It’s coming. You can’t just nuke the market in America and expect to survive politically. It will take time but nothing Trump has done up till now has really been bad economically, so it’s easy for GOP to hang on because he kept the money flowing and people remember Trump 1 as a great time for the economy. But if all of a sudden we have GFC Part 2 and it’s 100% attributable to his actions he will be toast.
Not sure how trustworthy this is as a proxy but the comments section on Wall Street Journal articles was a MAGA shithole up till a few weeks ago. Now it’s full of people with regret and complaining about their investments and how Trump is a buffoon, etc. Once the mass layoffs and 10-20%+ inflation hit it will be over
rockbier1218
22d ago
I’m actually bullish on this happening. People are already shitting themselves and we haven’t even begun to feel the inflation, layoffs, pullback in consumer spending etc.
Even Trump cannot survive 10-20% inflation, layoffs, market meltdown, etc. when all it takes to rebound it is either get rid of him or take his tariff power away
Is Trump actually just cooked now? There is absolutely no way his tariffs don't cause major pain through huge inflation (the thing people voted for him to fix!), layoffs, and the return of stagflation. I mean these tariff numbers are absolutely eye-popping.
2 arguments I can steelman for the tariffs:
- Give it time, the incentives will slowly lead to a resurgent manufacturing sector.
- These tariffs can be re-negotiated and Trump is using door-in-the-face technique to extract favorable terms.
For 1, maybe true but almost certainly would take years if not decades. Meanwhile stock market is 50% of peak, boomers' retirement and everyone's 401k has evaporated in a puff of smoke, layoffs that ripple through almost every industry as consumers pull back on spending and the engine of America's economy (aforementioned consumer spending) grinds to a halt. In other words Trump is toast because nobody is willing to suffer through that for 4 years, let alone 4 months. Republicans get annihilated in midterms unless Congress takes back tariff powers from the executive. The one thing you can't do in America is fuck with the economy, it's the raison d'etre of the entire thing. And this can't be blamed on vague macro factors or credit default swaps, it's entirely traceable to Trump and his tariffs and everybody and their mother knows it. Even a child can understand what a tariff is conceptually.
For 2, also maybe true. But the uncertainty will lead to R&D pullbacks, depressed investment, and FUD all over the place as long as Trump is in power. This argument and scenario is the optimistic case. But even here you're again fucking with the American raison d'etre. Stability, certainty, relative lack of political shenanigans with the economy are a large part of the reason everybody and their mother wants to invest in America. If you take that away all of a sudden America doesn't seem so attractive anymore. Economy probably chugs along but either way it's nothing like Trump's first term and voters again have a very obvious catalyst for their economic malaise.
Honestly I don't see how Trump or Trumpism survive as a political force. DOGE was a farcical disaster which didn't even touch SS, medicare, or the military and consumed massive amounts of political capital, and now Trump is basically going full retard and strapping on his suicide vest as he wages jihad on the American economy. Trumpism's political capital is deep in the red now, and we haven't even begun to feel the tariff pain. If he actually keeps the tariffs and Congress doesn't wake up and take that power back, I'm not even sure the guy makes it to 2026.
rockbier1218
1mo ago
I didn’t vote but probably leaned his direction. Mainly for immigration control, tax relief, and what I thought were some interesting foreign policy plays (Greenland, Panama Canal).
He definitely is doing worse than I had anticipated. The cuts to medical research in particular are absolutely galling. Who gives a shit if there is some administrative bloat in world-leading cancer research that has undeniable economic benefits? It’s all a drop in the bucket compared to entitlement programs, which he is not touching at all.
In general he is continuing to perpetrate this unbearable gerontocracy where old people hoard the wealth and kneecap younger generations through incredible housing prices, NIMBY, and parasitism from social security and Medicare.
rockbier1218
3mo ago
So this is the opposite of a small-scale question, but similar to what I posted below, I’ve been going through somewhat of an existential crisis about mortality and the purpose of human life.
I want to hear all of your beliefs about the big mysterious questions. For my entire life until now I have been the hardest of hard materialist/physicalist atheists. Surprise surprise that at 32 that doesn’t fill the god-shaped hole in my heart anymore.
I’m currently just thinking about how weird all of this is. Is the universe an eternal thing? Is it a simulation? How do you actually handle the hard problem of consciousness? The Fermi paradox?
Something that has been tempting me is Michael Huemer’s argument about infinite reincarnation, very similar to nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. Essentially the bastardized argument is that if the universe is infinite in both temporal directions and you already were plucked from nothingness and given consciousness once, it will happen again even if the probability is infinitesimally small (because if time is infinite it’s bound to happen).
So what do you all think? What gives you comfort when pondering mortality?
rockbier1218
3mo ago
What do people think about the idea of longevity escape velocity happening in our lifetimes? (I’m 32)
I confess thoughts of my mortality have hit me pretty hard recently and this idea has given me some hope. It seems like it could be cope but there’s also huge amounts of money in this space (like Altos Labs) and it seems to have come a long way in terms of legitimacy and talent recruitment from a decade ago.
Combining that with AI improvements it doesn’t seem so unreasonable to me that we could conceivably see some wild advances in the next 2-3 decades.
I mean even 15 years ago immunotherapy for cancer was not noteworthy enough to be included in a popular overview book “The Emperor of All Maladies” and now it’s a treatment that’s used all over the place, albeit with varying success rates.
rockbier1218
7mo ago
This comment resonates with me. I come from a culture where elders are respected almost to a fault, and people are expected to defer to the whims of the oldest people in the family at all times.
This kind of setup was probably fine and maybe even made sense for most of human history, but now that people are being kept alive into their 80s and even 90s with ease, it leads to a lot of material and emotional burden on the rest of the family.
To give an example, I live in an apartment with my wife and my mother is the landlord. My mother charges me MARKET-RATE RENT with the stated reason being to help her support my grandfather and pay for his rent and living expenses. In a previous post I mentioned family planning with my wife, and the fact that we’re paying rent to support my grandfather is a non-trivial stressor on our discussions about having kids. Now what kind of fucked-up arrangement is this? The family unit is sacrificing its future material prosperity to care for somebody who probably shouldn’t even be alive except for modern medicine and is an active burden on the rest of the family?
Until me and my generation, essentially nobody in my family has had to worry about supporting their grandparents in old age (not just financially, but emotionally and in the sense of having to defer to their wishes and antiquated opinions) and often their own parents would be dead by the time they became productive members of society ready to build wealth.
At least from my anecdotal perspective this kind of absurd arrangement of transferring wealth from the young to the very old and infirm (I haven’t even mentioned social security and medicare) is a major cause of declining birth rates. How many more families would we have if people died at a natural age, they passed on their wealth and estate, and the next generation could focus on building wealth and supporting their own children?
rockbier1218
8mo ago
My wife and I are thinking of having kids, but we’re both somewhat on the fence. My wife leans more into the NO camp and I lean a bit more into the YES camp.
Factors to consider:
- I have family nearby but the relationship between them and my wife is not great. My mother in particular is kind of insane. Her family is in a state that’s about a 10-hour drive away.
- Financially we are stable upper-middle class (I work in Big Tech and she has a stable fake email job) but no housing that we actually own (we rent out an apartment my mother owns). My wife wants a bigger place for kids but housing prices are insane (we can afford it though) and I think buying a house at the same time we have kids would stress the budget a bit more than I’m comfortable with.
- I always saw myself having kids but I’m not sure I can really commit to losing all of my independence and free time. I tend to need a lot of down time from my job and I don’t know if I can handle being always “on” with a kid in the mix.
- Seeing some other younger family members in the extended family become absolute pieces of shit as they enter adulthood (lazy, no ambition to get a good job, sit at home on their phones all day, hang out and just do drugs constantly) despite coming from relatively stable middle-class homes and no real traumatic issues has me seriously considering if it’s worth pouring myself into children only for them to end up as human lay-abouts who parasite off of my hard work (honestly seems like a 50/50 chance based off of my extended family). My wife’s only sister is also a horrendous mentally-ill psychopath who is addicted to drugs and hates the world for existing, lives on welfare, hates my wife’s parents for no reason despite them being decent, hard-working, and good people who gave them a good home and lots of love. You likely know this type of person, just human garbage. And all of this despite her parents giving them a good middle-class life in a good school district in suburban America (the easiest place in the world to grow up).
- Terrified of having a severely disabled (like non-verbal autism) child which seems like a tremendous ordeal for little reward.
All of that said, I love kids and wish I could share a lot of my interests and pass down traditions and see the world through new fresh eyes and have a family to give me meaning as I get older. But seeing how it often (seriously, a 50/50 shot in my extended family) turns out horrifically, I’m not sure it’s worth rolling the dice.
Can I solicit some feedback from mottizens on if you have kids, do you regret it, how is it working out?
rockbier1218
8mo ago
I have three “projects” going on at the moment.
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I’m getting back into guitar playing after way too much time letting my skills atrophy. I finally bought a high quality electric and a practice amp that suits my needs. Previously I didn’t really play because my wife goes to bed really early and we live in a small apartment, and I like to play at night after work. So this tiny practice amp and electric will let me noodle around with headphones quietly.
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I’m working on losing some weight that I slowly gained over the last 5 years and really since COVID. Started at a disgusting 182 and finally down to 172. Very very happy with my progress, a tiny bit slower than I would like (took 2 months) but that’s probably healthier and more sustainable than a truly deep calorie cut. Goal weight is 150-155 and maybe less depending on how much body fat I still have.
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Finally I’m getting back into writing poetry after almost a decade without. I was really big into the scene during college but simply lost the inspiration and spark as adulthood settled in and those acute emotions of being a teenager and very young adult faded away. Problem is I don’t really have a place to share it, and most of the Reddit-type forums feature some pretty mediocre Rupi Kaur, cliche-ridden garbage. Not to be an arrogant douche but I think I am at least several tiers above that, I published some poetry in magazines back in college and won some awards from the English department, so I feel confident in saying I’m better than average (by no means amazing). In college I had a great group of like-minded people who would workshop but I don’t really know how to find that anymore and most poetry scenes are also bleeding-edge woke :( For now it’ll have to remain something I keep for myself I guess.
rockbier1218
8mo ago
Agreed the sequels are not worth your time. I found Hyperion to be excellent and the sequels quite mediocre, surprisingly so.
rockbier1218
8mo ago
It’s a tricky one and I think it could easily be argued that Shapiro would have been the better choice. Nate Silver had a ranking of swing states by importance to probability of winning the electoral college, and in both cases whoever wins Pennsylvania has a ~90% chance of winning the election.
Shapiro is popular in Pennsylvania and that’s probably enough to tip the state to the democrats.
But yeah there does seem to be one too many skeletons in his closet and I’m sorry, the IDF thing (whatever you want to call it, it’s at least a conflict of interest) is fucking “weird” and probably should disqualify him from any kind of national office dealing with foreign policy.
rockbier1218
8mo ago
I can forgive the testing errors. It’s hard to test every possible thing and I’m sure the developers were under a lot of time pressure to ship “features features features” because tech management just keeps asking for more every year.
But the lack of a canary rollout is unforgivable and would seriously make me question the software running on my machine (if I’m a customer). You can’t even rollout locally to some virtual machines you have in a staging environment to ensure they run before YOLO pushing to every customer? Even if it’s not “code” and it’s just a config you’re pushing, you absolutely must must must stage and canary rollouts. Not doing it is catastrophic incompetence, and I actually thank Crowdstrike for proving the point because now I have cover for a few years to tell managers to suck my dick if they ask for a YOLO rollout.
rockbier1218
8mo ago
OP if you are high IQ as you claim, you will stop reading after this post. Unless you have a candidate ready to swap to immediately, as in you are currently having an affair with a high IQ high-class woman who wants to have your babies, you are embarking on a fool’s errand. Or are you very attractive and confident that there are many women willing to sleep with you? In that case maybe your thinking is sound.
For what it’s worth yes IQ is clearly heritable, but my dad was the “smart” one (bootstrapped out of poverty and worked as both an engineer and in finance) and my mom was below-average, in both cases the grandparents were peasant serfs with no more than a 5th grade education. And I am smarter than my father. So it’s not written in stone that your kids will be an exact average between 125 and 110, you might have a me and pop out a 130-135.
rockbier1218
8mo ago
Indeed us Americans don’t grasp how rich we are, even the relatively poor among us when compared to the rest of the world. My European coworkers are noticeably poorer and have much less wealth than our US-based employees, working the exact same job and sometimes even lower-ranked. To them, a 100k euro salary is “living like a king” even though it really isn’t and that salary is just about middle class in America these days.
It’s actually odd to me how little their 100k goes in their countries. The average salary is way below, closer to 30-40k, maybe 50k. And yet they still don’t seem to meaningfully be able to stay ahead of the curve and create wealth. It strikes me that a lot of this is due to the tremendous amount of old people that are living high on the hog with generous government assistance (and the required taxes), or maybe just tons of competition for prime European real estate with global capital? I can’t seem to find a definitive answer, it’s odd to me that if you’re making 3x the average salary you’re not able to put a lot away in wealth. That should persist even after taxes, which really are not much worse than VHCOL cities in the US these days.
rockbier1218
8mo ago
I’m not sure there’s any lesson to take here other than don’t let openly senile people run for president?
Yeah it was a great move, but was very clearly the obvious one for a very long time, in the same way that telling an ugly fat guy to go to the gym and lose some weight is a great move if his goal is to attract women.
rockbier1218
8mo ago
Agree that we’d be way better off as a society if these psychopaths decided to target politicians or shady businessmen or something.
rockbier1218
8mo ago
I don’t think these crime statistics really capture the picture. How often are things even reported? In NYC many quality of life offenses have blended so deeply into the noise of city life that nobody will report it because it’s not a serious crime.
If a psychotic drug zombie is screaming at me on the subway platform about wanting to stab me and how he could kill me, is that a crime? Actually yes, it’s technically an assault under NY State law. Will anybody report it? LOL
Repeat this ad nauseam and you see how crime statistics are low but there is a massive degradation in quality of life
rockbier1218
8mo ago
It’s definitely odd given his age. You would expect at least some internet profiles somewhere to have popped up by now.
Based on all of the public information, my speculation is that he was simply a classic school shooter type (wanting attention, to remind society of his existence) that decided to target a politician instead.
rockbier1218
9mo ago
Hocam is this in Turkey or a western country? Advice will vary based on your answer
rockbier1218
9mo ago
It's interesting to read your perspective on family relationships. I couldn't stand to be around my family by the time I was 17 and went away to college, never to return. My remaining grandfather, a similar age to yours, has always been a classic holier-than-thou ignorant religious prick and I also come from an eastern culture where filial piety is THE virtue of all virtues, and as a result everybody bent over backwards to kiss his ass and not upset him. I can't even imagine a universe where I would be in your shoes and missing my grandfather at all. I actively dread every time I have to go to my mother's house to visit him and the rest of my family.
All of that to say, you are lucky to have a family that you will actually miss when you are away from them. In that sense "everything will be okay" is already your reality. The material circumstances will come and go, but being able to carry that kind of family in your heart is already the endgame ideal. You already won, just enjoy the ride.
Good luck to you in Scotland!
There’s certainly a never-say-die subset of true believers but I doubt that’s even the majority of the coalition that elected him in November. I think most people were voting against democrat incompetence on inflation and illegal immigration in that order.
If trumpflation ends up being even worse than Biden’s and comes with stagflation and layoffs to boot, I can easily see a new GOP coalition that unites around “Trump but minus tariffs”. And there’s a very clear and straightforward process to make that happen, just need the veto-proof majority in congress to take away tariff powers and let Trump do whatever else he wants
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